High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) (10 page)

“Is there a street perhaps or a place in Los Angeles called Yesno or Yezno or Yeznoyes or …”

“That’s it, Gunther,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “No Yes. Noyes. There is a street called Noyes in Burbank, and that’s where I was tonight. Costello didn’t know how to pronounce it. Maybe he was telling us where he was killed, not who killed him. So what do we have?”

You have,” explained Gunther, “a man who was murdered on Noyes Street.”

“I don’t see what difference where he was killed makes. But that’s my knife in his back. Either the killer came here earlier and took it, or he got Costello here somehow and killed him. Either way he was dumped here to get me in trouble and out of a case I’m on.”

There was a loud knock at the door downstairs.

“Phil,” I said, and Gunther put his hands in his robe and hurried back to his room. He had no affection for Phil, and Phil in a bad mood would think nothing of drop-kicking Gunther through the window.

There was no chance that Mrs. Plaut would hear the door no matter how hard Phil pounded. I ran down and opened it.

Phil Pevsner, brother of Tobias Leo Pevsner who at an early age became Toby Peters, was a little taller than me, a little broader, a few years older and much heavier. His hair was close-cut, curly and the color of steel. His thick, strong fingers scratched constantly from habit; dandruff or perplexity, I’ve never been sure. He started doing it in 1918 when he came back from the war. Phil hadn’t even bothered with the tie he usually kept unmade around his neck. Behind him stood Sergeant Steve Seidman, a cadaverous man who had little to say and was my brother’s partner. Seidman was a strange creature, a man who actually liked my brother.

“Where is it?” Phil said through his teeth.

I handed him the crumpled sheet with the Yankee autographs. He crushed it in his fist and was about to fling it in my face.

“They’re real,” I said, holding up my hands. “For Dave and Nate.”

He shoved the paper into his pocket and pushed me out of the way. Seidman followed behind, giving me a shake of his head to show me he disapproved of my not growing up.

In my room, we stood looking down at Costello solemnly for a few seconds before Phil sighed and Seidman began to examine the body.

“Now,” said Phil, grabbing my shirt and looking into my eyes, “start talking—fast, clear and straight.”

Phil hated crime just a little more than he hated me. His impulse was to smash a hole through criminals and brothers and make straight for whatever sunlight and peace might be on the other side. Sometimes I thought Phil might have a few screws rattling around in his head. For more than twenty-five years he had been trying to clean up Los Angeles. The more he cleaned up and the more criminals he found, the more corpses came. At one point he had even charged a two-bit gunman with picking wildflowers, a crime punishable in Los Angeles by a $200 fine and up to six months in jail. There was no end to being a cop, and that frustrated him. Since he could never really win, he hated each new murderer and victim, who reminded him that things were getting worse instead of better, that Phil Pevsner would not make it a better world for his three kids. Since I seemed to be in the business of bringing him more business, I was not one of his favorite Californians.

“I don’t know his name,” I said. “He’s from Chicago, a minor hood. A case I’m on has something to do with a guy named Lombardi, who just came here from the East to start a sausage factory.”

“A case?” said Phil evenly. “Tell me more about it.”

“Client,” I said and smiled. “I have to check with the client.”

“How many times did I tell you there is no such thing for private detectives? You’re not a priest or a lawyer. Sam Spade was full of shit.” Phil shook me around a little to see if sense would find an accidental resting place in my head. It wouldn’t.

“I’m not talking about the law,” I said. “I’m talking about ethics.”

Phil laughed. I didn’t like the laugh. I think he was getting ready to go for the long-distance Toby-throwing record. So I talked fast.

“This guy and another Chicago hood named Marco were tailing me. They picked me up yesterday and they’ve been on my tail since.”

“So you got upset and skewered one of them when he came to lean on you,” Phil explained.

“No,” I said. “I was out for the night at a bar in Burbank. You can check at the bar. It wasn’t crowded.”

“That’s not proof of anything, and you know it,” shouted Phil. “You recognize the knife?”

“Which knife?” I said innocently.

“The one in the guy’s back, you smartass piece of …” If I had enough nose left for him to break, he would have done it. Seidman put a hand on his shoulder and stepped between us. Phil backed off, his face red, his teeth grinding.

“Back off, Toby,” Seidman whispered. He had seen this game of bait-the-brother between me and Phil before. He had tried to figure it out and had tried to reason with both of us, me to stop needling Phil and Phil to stop taking the hook. The Pevsner brothers are a proud and foolish lot. We have no interest in listening to reason.

“You think you can keep from driving him to kill you while I call the evidence boys and the coroner?” Seidman said, looking over at Phil, who was glaring angrily at the corpse.

“Okay,” I said, and Seidman went out to use the hall phone.

With his back to me, Phil said, “Did he say anything before he died?”

“Only Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Costello,” I said.

Phil didn’t turn. I think he was trying to count to ten.

“On the head of my wife and kids,” he said with a calmness that scared even me, “if you give me one more wise-ass answer tonight, I’ll maim you.”

He had done it before. It was time for me to cut the comments and stick to lies and near-facts. I wasn’t sure if it was in me. My brain is trickier than I am and makes me say things that aren’t always healthy for either of us.

“Maybe your client did this?” Phil tried.

“Nope,” I said, moving to the sofa to sit and being careful not to touch Mrs. Plaut’s doilies. I noticed for the first time that if you looked at the doily long enough, you could see the face of Harold Ickes in the pattern. “In a crazy way, old Costello here and my client were after the same thing. There is a guy whose name I don’t know who looks like a file cabinet. He—”

“No name …?” said Phil, adding, “You got a clean glass?”

I found him a glass, and he filled it with water and took a white pill from a bottle in his coat. I knew better than to ask what it was.

“What was that?” I asked, even though I knew better.

“Anti-Toby pills,” he said, rubbing his fingers over his gray stubble of morning beard. Seidman came back. His face showed nothing. It never did, but his eyes went to both of us to be sure that we had survived a minute or two alone together.

“They’ll be here in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

There was a knock on the door and Seidman opened it to Mrs. Plaut, who came in clutching her robe around her with one hand and holding a lug wrench in the other.

“Are you in need of assistance, Mister Peelers?” she said, looking with suspicion at Phil and Seidman.

“No, thank you, Mrs. Plaut,” I said. “These are policemen. There’s been an accident.”

Then her eyes caught sight of the body slumped over with the knife in his back.

“You call that an accident?” she said. “There is no way anyone can get accidentally stabbed in the back. And that’s my knife. Mr. Peelers, that knife will have to be thoroughly cleaned or replaced.”

“It will be, Mrs. Plaut,” I said reassuringly, ushering her back out the door. She seemed to be hearing much better in the hours before dawn.

“I didn’t think you were that kind of exterminator,” she whispered to me in the hall.

“I’m not,” I said as she turned her back. She put the wrench over her shoulder and went down the stairs.

“Your knife,” said Phil when I came back in.

“I didn’t recognize it,” I said.

“We’re going to my office,” said Phil. It wasn’t an invitation. When the evidence men came, Phil and I got in his car. Seidman stayed behind to interview people in the boarding house and neighborhood who might have seen something.

Phil and I said nothing all the way to the Wilshire station. When we got inside, Phil didn’t bother to greet the old sergeant on duty, and when we got upstairs, the only ones in the detective squad room were a cleaning woman and Cawelti, a guy with tight clothes, a smirk and hair parted down the middle and plastered like a Gay Nineties bartender. We waded through the day’s garbage and into Phil’s office, where he sat heavily in his chair behind the desk. I sat in the chair opposite him. We looked at each other for a few minutes, and for the first time I realized that Phil’s office was about the same size as my office. Not only that—he had laid it out the same way mine was, even down to his cop diploma on the wall and a photograph, only the photograph was of his wife and kids. I tried to remember whose office had come first. I thought it was his. I considered pointing out the resemblance we both had missed, but Phil picked up his phone.

“Get me two coffees,” he barked. The person on the other end, who I assumed was Cawelti, said something and Phil nodded politely before continuing. “That’s a sad story, John. I don’t care if you have to run down to the drugstore and break in. I want
you
to be in my office with two coffees within ten minutes or I’ll give you a coffee enema.” He hung up, ever the master of the colorful vulgarism.

“Pa wanted you to be a lawyer,” he said out of nowhere.

“I didn’t want to be a lawyer,” I said. “I liked my hands in my own pockets.” I’d read that somewhere, but I didn’t know the source and was sure Phil wouldn’t.

“You could have been a police officer. You were …” He stopped. We had been through this and it got us nowhere. He reached into his drawer and found a pad of paper. He reached deeper and found a pencil. He shoved them both to me and told me to write out a report, the whole thing. He didn’t even say “or else.”

I asked Phil what time it was.

“You’ve got a watch,” he growled.

“Pa’s watch,” I explained. Phil told me it was three in the morning.

I pulled out the card Cooper had given me and called the number while Phil stared at me.

“Huh?” came Cooper’s sleepy voice.

“This is Toby Peters. We’ve got a complication.” I explained what had happened without giving anything away to Phil and hoped that Cooper hadn’t fallen asleep. Then I concluded, “I think I should tell them about your involvement and ask for their discretion.”

“I don’t like it,” said Cooper finally.

“I’m not throwing a party over the whole thing myself,” I said.

“A man has to do what a man has to do,” said Cooper. “I say things like that in my movies but I don’t know what they really mean. So you do what you have to as long as I don’t have to back it up in public.”

I hung up and began the report. I was just finishing when Cawelti brought in the coffee. He was not happy about bringing in the coffee. He was not happy about seeing me.

“Thanks, John,” Phil said.

“Thanks, John,” I added, and Cawelti left, slamming the door behind him.

The coffee was cold, but it was coffee. My report was all truth. I left out a lot, but what was in there was bonded stuff that would hold up.

“Do I get a ride home?” I said.

“It’s a nice morning,” said Phil, finishing his coffee. “You can take a streetcar or taxi. It will give you some time to think and us some time to tidy up your room.”

I said thanks and went into the squad room. Cawelti was gone, but the cleaning lady had accumulated a shoulder-high pile of rubble.

“You a cop?” she said in a pretty good Marjorie Main imitation.

“No,” I said.

“You’d be surprised at the junk I find in here sometimes,” she said, starting to shovel her pile into a barrel on wheels. “Found an ear once,” she said. “How can you lose an ear?”

I left her musing on life as I went out and into the first chill hint of dawn. I didn’t have to walk home, as it turned out. I went half a block toward the drugstore, from where I planned to call a cab, when a car pulled along next to me and Marco looked out and back at the station.

“Get in,” he said.

“I think I’ll walk,” I said. “Fresh air will do me good.”

“Get in,” he insisted, showing his gun. “In back.”

“We’re half a block from the police station,” I reminded him.

“And you’re a few seconds from termination, if you don’t get in,” he said.

I liked his reasoning and got into the back seat. I wasn’t alone. Lombardi sat with one hand rubbing the bridge of his nose. He had a headache, and it was probably me.

“Our friends from Chicago are very upset at this turn of events,” Lombardi said softly. “And I am not pleased, either. We understand that Mr. Santucci has been murdered.”

Marco squirmed in the front seat and nearly whimpered, “What do I tell my wife? He is supposed to be breaking me into the business and he gets killed. How do you think she’ll feel after what happened to her brother?”

“Bad?” I guessed.